It’s all about Frank and the places his words can take you: a heated swimming pool in the hills, a Tokyo back alley, the first-class lounge at the Delta terminal. The piano chords are simple and translucent the beat ambles casually. There isn’t much to it in terms of melody or structure. “Chanel” is the first and best of them, capturing an artist in total command of his faculties as a singer, writer, and rapper.

–Matthew SchnipperĪfter releasing Blonde in 2016, Frank Ocean spent the next year trickling out a series of singles that built upon that album’s fluid confidence. With this song, at least, Yorke makes it sound beautiful. In a state of mourning, though, something that should be sweet can often turn sour. Nature lovers can’t get enough of it, but here, Yorke calls it a “bloody racket.” That seems off for him, to criticize the organic world. The term “dawn chorus” describes the sound birds make at sunrise during mating season. “In the middle of the vortex the wind picked up/Shook up the soot from the chimney pot into spiral patterns of you my love.”

“I think I missed something, but I’m not sure what,” he says in a murmur that makes it seem like he’s dragging his voice across the floor reluctantly. Though the pair had split about 18 months before her passing, it’s impossible to not feel like he’s reflecting, however obliquely, on his own loss. The death of Thom Yorke’s longtime partner, Rachel Owen, in late 2016 casts a shadow over “Dawn Chorus,” the emotional center of his solo album Anima. But his actual relationship to such sources could be hard to read: Was Maus poking fun at music’s power to manufacture an emotional response, like when we find ourselves crying in the middle of a commercial, or celebrating its potential to offer us a fleeting moment of ecstasy, a glimpse of a world that is better than our own? Arriving at the end of 2011’s We Must Be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves with the cathartic finality of perfectly curated exit music, this song-with its glittering harpsichord arpeggios, briskly pulsing bass, and grandiose allusions to borderless love-is the closest Maus has ever come to being a true believer. Like many of his lo-fi pop contemporaries in the early ’10s, reclusive Midwesterner John Maus pushed underground music forward by looking backward-rejecting digital studio techniques in favor of old drum machines and wonky synths, excavating the dramatic excesses of ’80s stadium pop and sentimental radio jingles as though they held clues to some hard-to-pinpoint generational subconscious.

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